


If I Can’t Get Clean (I’m Gonna Drink My Life Away)

by gelbes_gilatier



Series: war is a game (that is played with a smile) [4]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Celebrations, Drinking, Gen, POV Second Person, Soldiers, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-10
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-31 09:04:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12678741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gelbes_gilatier/pseuds/gelbes_gilatier
Summary: The Battle of Endor is over, and Davits Draven isn't celebrating.





	If I Can’t Get Clean (I’m Gonna Drink My Life Away)

**Author's Note:**

> Yassss, I'm finally done with this series (because there's no way I'm gonna write Draven in the new trilogy. No. _No_.), and this one took so fucking long because, believe it or not, I couldn't, for the life of me, find a sentence to start with. I'm still not 100% satisfied with the one I used in the end but I'm mostly okay with it, and I really wanted to write this story, so, here you are. Mon Mothma even makes a guest appareance. Yaaaay?

**If I Can’t Get Clean (I’m Gonna Drink My Life Away) **

_“Son of a bitch, give me a drink_   
_One more night_   
_This can't be me_   
_Son of a bitch_   
_If I can’t get clean I’m gonna drink my life away.”_

_Nathaniel Ratecliff & The Night Sweats, “S. O. B.”_

  
It wasn’t as much of a clusterfuck as it could have been.

You knew the intel, or you thought you knew. You didn’t know it was operational, though, and that gnaws. All around you, people are celebrating, and that’s fine. _They_ didn’t send a fleet into battle with insufficient intel, responsible for the loss of nine capital ships, three transports and an as of yet unspecified number of smaller spacecraft. And their crew. That gnaws the most. Losing ships hurts, but ultimately, ships can replaced. Crew, they can never be replaced.

They all think you don’t care about either – ships _or_ crews – and _some_ definitely think that you care more about the ships than the crews, and they’re right and they’re wrong. Ships are expensive, costing money the Alliance doesn’t have and that’s a problem. But ultimately, that’s the Quartermaster Corps scroungers’ problem, not yours. Lives lost due to insufficient intel, _that’s_ your problem.

You’re not stupid, and you’re not sentimental, you know that war means that people lose their lives. It’s tragic and it’s unbearable and it’s an inevitable tragedy, almost like a law of nature. But loss of life that could have been _prevented_ , with better intel, more reliable sources, harder work, that’s not tragic. That’s _on your head_.

There’s the temptation of putting this on Andor’s and Erso’s shoulders. It’s strong but it’s not how you work. They aren’t your only operatives, and intelligence doesn’t mean relying solely on two operatives. You wouldn’t be the spymaster everyone thinks you to be if you really only ran two operatives, if you didn’t check and cross check and triple check and then again check every bit of intel your operatives gather, if you didn’t have redundancies and fail-saves and emergency chutes built into each and every of your operations.

And yet, here you are. Nine capital ships. Three transports. Hundreds of smaller spacecraft. Fourteen-thousand three-hundred and twenty-five casualties. That you know of.

That’s already a shitty tally, and it’s going to become only worse once you put your people on it and get the Great Counting done that always follows a major battle and that always, somehow, ends up falling to you and your people. At the end of the day, it’s you and your people who know the exact cost to any battle, no matter if it’s a loss or a victory, and somewhere, at some point, you forgot how victory tasted when you were young and had the privilege of ignorance, of only knowing a piece of puzzle, not the bigger picture. Now it just tastes like ashes.

Well, that or the probably hazardous moonshine the locals are serving up tonight. The kind that someone just put next to you in a wooden cup in a deliberate and somewhat decisive motion.

You’re about to tell that someone to shove their alcohol and their festive mood where it’s dark, and go find someone to get you back to your maintenance closet of an office on the _Yavaris_ when you turn around and that someone turns out to be Mon Mothma. So. That’s one person you _can’t_ tell to go to Hell. Probably the only person you can’t just brush off in the entire Alliance, and she decides to make you go with the program and the theme of the night. Figures.

She doesn’t say anything, and for that you’re grateful. She just takes a sip from her own wooden cup of moonshine and leans against the same rock you’re leaning against, a careful measured distance of two hands between the two of you. You’re perched on a small hill at the edge of the forest, far away enough from the reveling troops that you can overlook the small valley with its flickering bonfires and groups of celebrating troops and furry little locals. You haven’t touched the cup of moonshine, not even after five minutes of silent watching.

“You don’t approve of it, do you, Davits?” Your first instinct is to ask her what she means be “it” but she’s not stupid. She knows that you know what she means by “it”.

You cross your arms in front of your chest. Even though your fingers itched for that cup of moonshine, or maybe because of it. You choose not to dwell on that. “They survived. They’re right to celebrate that.”

“Ah,” she makes in that conversational politician tone she always adopts when she’s about to lead someone around the ring and then thoroughly trounce them in a discussion, “you don’t disapprove, then. You just don’t want to join in.”

“Last time I checked, this wasn’t _mandatory_ fun, ma’am.” That came off passive-aggressive, and you regret it the moment you say it. It makes you look sour and ungracious when all you are is two steps ahead already.

You also expect her to correct you, once again. You have been serving under her for six years, give or take, and throughout that time she has made a continuous effort to get on first-name basis with you when you are off-duty, just like she did with the rest of her senior military and civilian staff. You have resisted each and every one of those attempts. She’s your commander-in-chief, and you can’t call your commander-in-chief by their first name, on or off-duty. You suspect that you are actually physically incapable of that.

She doesn’t, in the end, and you’re grateful for that. What she says instead, is, “You _are_ allowed to have fun without it being mandatory, Davits.”

Yes, of course you know that. You know that you have a lasting and comprehensive reputation of being a humorless killjoy, and the truth is that it’s not fully unwarranted but yes, at least the theoretical concept of “having fun” is known to you. “Of course,” you hear herself telling her, “I just chose not to.”

“Yes, that much is obvious.” Is she going to chide you for _not going off the rails with victory_? You wouldn’t put it past her. She has chided people for less. “What’s really going on here?”

Well. That is even worse than being chided over not celebrating. This might look like a casual off-duty encounter but she’s your commander-in-chief. For you, there are no casual off-duty encounters with your commanders. And when your commander-in-chief asks you what is really going on, you have no other choice than to tell her the truth.

Fine, you do. You always have a choice. That’s what you believe in, even in matters as seemingly trivial as this. But for you, the only _right_ choice is to actually answer the damn question. “At least nine capital ships, three transports, and an as of yet unspecified number of smaller spacecraft. That’s what’s going on, ma’am.”

She nods, and one of the reasons that you have never once considered jumping ship, even when you fundamentally disagreed with her or her decisions of her command style was that she understands. She _understands_ what those figures mean because she knows them herself, and she knows the _exact_ cost behind them. She _understands_ , and she _feels_ those figures. “I see.” You believe her. She really does see. “Then don’t have that cup to celebrate. Have it to honor.”

So. That’s not what you thought she would say. You almost expected her to tell you some bullshit about all those lost personnel not wanting them to dwell in sadness but you didn’t expect her to tell you something as simple and elegant and logical as _that_. Honestly, you should have come up with that yourself. And the fact that you didn’t expect _her_ to tell you something like that tells you that you really should work on your HUMINT skills.

To honor, then. You can’t drink to your failure, or to a victory that’s hollow for you but you _can_ drink to all those who didn’t make it. You feel yourself cracking an involuntary half-smile. “I can do that, ma’am.”

She smiles herself, in an “I get it” kind of way and you think that she does. She really does get it. She raises her cup. “To all those who were lost.”

You think that you see a kind of gleam in her eyes, something knowing and you realize that she doesn’t just mean all those they lost above Endor today. She means _all_ of them, everyone who lost their lives in service to the Alliance. She means Jheda and Scarif and Alderaan and the Pathfinders and Andor and Erso, and you’re almost touched by that last bit. You alone know that they’re not lost, at least weren’t when you talked to them two days ago but she never forgot about them, you can see that. Four years, and even most people in the intelligence community have moved on, but Mon Mothma never forgot Scarif and everyone who had a part in it.

You want to answer her but somehow, your voice doesn’t cooperate, and so you just touch your cup to hers, hoping she chalks up your silence to your usual taciturn self. You can see that she doesn’t.

It bothers you less than you thought it would, and you’re fine with that, probably because the local moonshine has some instant effect. You vow that this will be the first and only cup of that stuff you drink tonight. You really do have work to do.

“So,” she says, and takes a generous sip from her cup, “where do we go from here?”

You’re not sure whom she means with “we”. For the sake of your sanity, you decide that it’s a “we” meaning the Alliance, not that other implication, the one that would be more personal. “We,” you say, putting the cup away and hoping your speech doesn’t sound too slurred after only one of them, “do what we have been doing for the four years, ma’am.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Fight the Empire?”

“Yes, ma’am.” You’re pretty sure that was just a rhetorical question. She’s smart enough to know that it’s not over by a long shot. Now, in fact, comes the hard part. The clean-up operations. The mobbing up of all those Empire outposts out there, all the battle groups that will no doubt refuse to go down without a fight, all the insurrections that will start up all over, fired up by Imperial agents buried deep within the civilian population on hundreds, maybe thousands of planets. The _nightmare_.

“That’s the thing,” she says and looks at you, serious enough that you find yourself drawing up yourself and half-dreading what she has to say, “we can’t. Not forever. We can’t be so afraid of peace that we’d rather have perpetual war, Davits.”

She has seen through you, probably years ago. That’s what she tells you, right here, right now. She says “we” but she means “you”, and on a general level, one that doesn’t have to do with you, she’s right. At some point, you have to be willing to stop fighting, have to be willing to give in and go down another road, if you ever want peace.

But that’s the thing: you have never known peace, not really. You have been a military officer, have been at _war_ for more than half of your life. You have spent practically all of your adult life waging wars; open wars, covert wars, but always, always wars. You have killed people, you have sent people to their deaths, you have ordered other people to kill, and you don’t regret a day of that life. You were _meant to be_ that kind of being. You were meant to be a blade, sharp and always ready to use, and you will dull and rust and ultimately fade away if no one makes use of you. You are so, so _terrified_ by the thought of peace.

You consider telling her that, but Mon Mothma, with her razor-sharp politician’s mind and her sheer endless capacity for compassion will just feel sad for you, will try to find another purpose for you, will want to help you. You don’t _want_ help, though, and you _really_ don’t want anyone to find you or your life choices or your entire existence _sad_.

You tell her, “Yes, ma’am. We’ll get there.” You hope. For everyone else, at least, if not for yourself. You _are_ capable of compassion and empathy, you just don’t always chose to use it as your primary basis for decision-making. “We just _aren’t_ there, yet.”

And it’s _your_ job to make sure that sure that all of you get through this, through the nitty-gritty of all the ugly covert wet-work that is going to follow this grand, heroic battle.

She gives you another look, this one with slightly narrowed eyes, assessing you and probably finding your lacking, like she always does when she looks at someone like that. “You’re already plotting the next move. And the next three ones after that. Aren’t you?”

Well. There’s no use in lying. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You know,” she muses, and you’re surprised again by what comes next, “sometimes I think we don’t appreciate you as much as we should.”

It’s not like she’s wrong. But all the disdain and the mocking has never bothered you, not once. Neither does it bother your analysts and your operatives, and you know that because every one of your people who _is_ bothered by it leaves sooner or later. Usually, rather sooner than later.

What bothers you are your failures, like Scarif and Alderaan and this one, here, and you know your analysts and your operatives well enough to know that most of them see it the same way. You consider telling her that, but once again, she would probably just move to reassure you, tell you that some things you _can’t_ know, and she’s right. But some things, you _should_ know, and you didn’t and there’s no way you’re going to let her sugarcoat it.

So you go with something else. “We don’t serve for appreciation, ma’am.”

None of you do, because if anyone wants appreciation, they go into Starfighter Command or they join the Infantry. Those who join _your_ ranks, they don’t mind spending their entire service in the obscurity of a deep cover assignment or a windowless compartment deep inside a starship or a stuffy office in the bowels of a backwater base, and they _like_ it that way. They _prefer_ it that way. “Appreciation” just means “attention”, and intelligence personnel – both analysts _and_ operatives – are allergic to attention. In the intelligence business, attention means death. None of them are very fond of death.

“No,” she says and smiles, “but _you_ ’ll have to endure it for a bit for tonight.” She… produces an entire crude wooden _bottle_ of that moonshine from behind her back and refills their cups and you briefly wonder how _much_ she already had to drink.

In the end, you take that cup again and give her an impassive face and the words, “If I must.”

“Yes, you must,” she tells you and raises her cup, with the words, “To the military intelligence community.”

Well, you can’t very well not toast to your own soldiers, so you raise your cup and touch it to hers and echo her toast and in the distance, some EOD personnel make another round of fireworks go off. There’s some music from farther away, and singing and tomorrow, there will be hell to pay with a collective hangover clusterfuck of epic proportions but tonight, you don’t begrudge them their celebration, and you don’t even begrudge Mon Mothma her attempt at making you socialize. And to just plain get you drunk.

You toast again and take another sip and play along because she deserves it, after putting up with you for over six years, and you deserve it for putting up with her for over six years, and because tomorrow, things will be back to the usual wartime SNAFU, and you won’t be terrified then anymore.

As long as there’s still a war to fight, you won’t be terrified.

You drink to _that_ the most.


End file.
